Westbrook Pegler: Anti-semite, FDR-hater, quoted in Palin acceptance speech

[SOS]

(DU note: Laststeamtrain posted about this on 9/11/08. See: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=3976813
More detail has emerged thanks to Frank Rich's column today)

Thomas Frank and Frank Rich nail Palin on Westbrook Pegler quote in Palin acceptance speech:

The GOP 
Loves the Heartland 
To Death
By Thomas Frank
September 10, 2008

It tells us something about Sarah Palin's homage to small-town America, delivered to an enthusiastic GOP convention last week, that she chose to fire it up with an unsourced quotation from the all-time champion of fake populism, the belligerent right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler.
"We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity," the vice-presidential candidate said, quoting an anonymous "writer," which is to say, Pegler. As the New York Times pointed out in its obituary of him in 1969, Pegler once lamented that a would-be assassin "hit the wrong man" when gunning for Franklin Roosevelt."

http://www.wsj.com/article/SB122100226859616967.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today

The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket (edit)
By Frank Rich
September 13, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/opinion/14rich.html

A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.
The ambitious Palin and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too.
This was made clear in the most chilling passage of Palin’s acceptance speech. Aligning herself with “a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,” she read a quote from an unidentified writer who, she claimed, had praised Truman: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.”
There were several creepy subtexts at work here. Striking was the unnamed writer she quoted. He was identified by Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal as the now largely forgotten but once powerful right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler.

He (Pegler) decreed America was “done for” after Truman won a full term in 1948. For his part, Truman regarded the columnist as a “guttersnipe,” and with good reason. Pegler was a rabid McCarthyite who loathed F.D.R. and Ike and tirelessly advanced the theory that American Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (“geese,” he called them) were all likely Communists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/opinion/14rich.html

More on Westbrook Pegler:

Dangerous Minds (edit)
Slate
By Diane McWhorter

Pegler's career took off in 1933 when he became a nationally syndicated columnist with Scripps-Howard, roared along under the Hearst family, and ended 30 years later under the auspices of a twitchy sect of neo-Nazis and professional racists from the White Citizens Council and the Rev. Billy James Hargis' truly reptilian Christian Crusade. At his peak in the 1930s and 1940s, Pegler was a leading popularizer of one of the most concerted antidemocratic crusades in this country's history: the vicious backlash against the New Deal and the labor movement to which it gave legal protection. This anti-Roosevelt front included the country's major industrialists, anti-Semitic, red-baiting pamphleteers, Congressman Martin Dies' Committee on Un-American Activities, and an assortment of Depression-era demagogues (and men on horseback who conspired with Hitler's agents in this country).
Although Pegler did not turn against Roosevelt until the president's second term, he quickly became a shrill cheerleader for the right's campaign to paint the New Deal's democratic advances as an internationalist Communist plot. Pegler compared union advocates of the closed shop to Hitler's "goose-steppers."By the 1950s, however, Pegler was showing some nostalgia for the Third Reich. His proposal for "smashing" the AF of L and the CIO was for the state to take them over. "Yes, that would be fascism," he wrote. "But I, who detest fascism, see advantages in such fascism."
Pegler's assert(ed) in November 1963 that it is "clearly the bounden duty of all intelligent Americans to proclaim and practice bigotry"; his embrace of the label racist, "a common but false synonym for Nazi, used by the bigots of New York"; or his habit of calling Jews "geese," because they hiss when they talk, gulp down everything before them, and foul everything in their wake."

http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2096673


Palin's Pegler

[SOS]

1. A shameless

:kick:

The fact that Pegler's right-wing extremism is informing the speeches of Palin seems like it should be of some concern to the future of the Republic.

[Armstead]

2. Nahhhhhh....She's cute and a Hockey Mom. That's all that matters.

But this certainly deserves many K&R s.

[SOS]

3. That seems to be where we're at in this country

But this revelation that the speechwriter used Pegler's words (unattributed) in Palins teleprompter presentation is deeply troubling.
It indicates that Matthew Sculley, the guy who wrote the speech, is so well acquainted with the lunatic Pegler that he saw fit to use his words in the speech.
It clearly shows the thinking and the sources of the right-wing extremism that has infected the former Republican Party.
This is the ideology behind the curtain and we are on the road to a very ugly and dangerous future.

[beac]

4. K&R ! n/t

[Armstead]

5. nuther kick